WHITE COAL is less a film about coal, although it uses the material as its source of investigation, than an exploration into motifs of industrial films from the 1920s to the present. Loosely inspired by Hermann Melville's The Confidence Men, a story about a blind messenger aboard a Mississippi steamboat, one thread of the film follows a crew of workers on a Polish coal ship. A second thread portrays the architechture and circumstances of coal burning at the world's largest coal burning power plant, located in Taychung, Taiwan.

A production of Subobscura Films (Austria) supported by Innovative Film Austria and the Austrian Film Institute

Georg Tiller, was born 1982 in Vienna, Austria.

After unfinished philosophy and theater studies, he studied film studies first with Harun Farocki at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, then film directing and cinematography with Michael Haneke and Christian Berger at the Film Academy Vienna and later film directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). Since early on he has been working as a freelance artist and filmmaker later also as a producer of his own and his friends work, initially with the artist collective naivsuper. His films have been shown at numerous film festivals around the world and he has exhibited his work at the Bienal de Såo Paulo, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Luleå Vinter Bienal among many other places. He is one of the co- founders of the production company Mengamuk Films and managing director of Subobscura Films. Georg currently lives in Vienna and Berlin.